Frist Art Museum Presents MARY SIBANDE: BLUE PURPLE RED

The Frist Art Museum presents Mary Sibande: Blue Purple Red, an exhibition of the Johannesburg-based artist's hyperrealistic sculptures and photographs that confront inequities of race, gender, politics, and economics in South Africa. Organized by the Frist Art Museum, the exhibition will be on view in the Frist's Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery from October 8, 2021, through January 2, 2022.

In Sibande's practice, the colors blue, purple, and red figure prominently in clothing worn by mannequins to reflect stages of South Africa's political history. "They are not ideological stances so much as motifs reflecting emotional trajectories of resignation, hope, and anger," said Frist Art Museum chief curator Mark Scala. "Her cast of characters, typically women of color, engage in narratives that range from the subversive to the supernatural." In sculptures and photographs, they are shown in theatrical tableaux, reflecting the artist's background in fashion design. These costume dramas tell stories of powerful women who dream of a better life for themselves and their country.

The central character of Sibande's work, a persona she has named Sophie, has been cast from her own face and body. She is loosely inspired by the artist's mother, who, like many women in her family, had been a domestic worker struggling to survive at the lower end of the economy. In early work, this alter ego wears the blue and white often associated with maids' uniforms, symbolizing one of the few types of employment that many impoverished Black South African women could obtain. Stylistically, however, Sophie's dresses, with their Victorian excess, lace, and chiffon, recall the fancy attire of white women of leisure in nineteenth-century British South Africa. In conversation with Scala, Sibande expressed the idea that each generation has its own unique dreams. In her work, the blue-clad apartheid-era Sophie dreams of transcending her conditions of material poverty; purple-clad Sophie from the early years of democracy dreams of achieving full selfhood. Today's red-clad Sophie dreams that there can be no peace without justice. Sibande has suggested that the color of her future work might represent utopia, an unreachable place. "Whatever color the costumes turn out to be, the constant will certainly be Blackness, the color of women who for Sibande embody hope and transformation," said Scala.

Mary Sibande, born in Barberton, South Africa, in 1982, lives and works in Johannesburg. Her work has been exhibited in the South African pavilion of the Venice Biennale (2010); the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (2010); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro (2011); the Lyon Biennale (2013); the British Museum (2016); and The Met Breuer (2018). She has received the Smithsonian National Museum of Art's African Art Award (2017) and other honors, including an Ampersand Foundation Fellowship and a Kidder Residency in the Arts at the University of Michigan.

Program

Saturday, October 9
Artist's Perspective: Mary Sibande
Noon
Visit FristArtMuseum.org/events to learn more.

Join Sibande as she discusses Blue Purple Red in relation to intersections of race, gender, and class in South Africa.

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